Learning to Compute: An Overview of Computing Education in England from 1970 to 2014

This paper will present a brief history of computing education in England from 1970 to 2014. It sets out to provide the context which shaped the 2014 computing curriculum. After this curriculum had been in place for almost a decade, the paper provides an opportunity to see how computing skills, including information communications technology (ICT), have been taught in England and how that shifted towards a more computer-science-focused curriculum in 2014. This paper gives a brief overview of how the formal subjects of information technology (IT), ICT, and computing became a strategic part of UK compulsory education. It examines the introduction of computers into schools in the 1980s, what computing in schools looked like, and how different forms of computing were variously integrated into the national curriculum for England and Wales.